The Graham Perkin Award
The Australian has misreported the facts about the Graham Perkin Award (The Australian, Media, 4/9/08). "Fairfax has also withdrawn its $20,000 a year funding for the Graham Perkin Award for journalistic excellence, which was instituted in 1976 as a memorial to the late editor of its Melbourne broadsheet The Age. Fairfax has denied axing the awards money was part of its cost-cutting, saying it planned to hold internal awards instead."
Just the facts:
Members of the Perkin family and The Age are due to meet next week to discuss how the Graham Perkin Award can be made more meaningful and effective. No decision or announcement about its future has been made, and won't be made until those discussions are over. It is important that talk about the Graham Perkin Award be kept completely separate from the present wide-ranging debate about Fairfax Media's business improvement program announced by David Kirk on August 26, 2008. Given that Fairfax Media has never included withdrawal of the Graham Perkin Award as part of its broader cost-saving strategy, the two issues are completely separate.
